Guide to Upgrading ESXi Hosts Using CLI

With recent articles I published about Commission ESXI hosts (see here), with VMware Cloud Foundation, I prepared 3 of my physical servers with an ESXi image and not managed by vCenter. I want to commission these hosts to SDDC Manager 5.2.1.1, however, during my initial install, the version was no longer compatible. During validation, I came across the following error

This led me to want to upgrade the hosts via CLI and as extra help for others out there.

With that, I needed to resort to either re-image the hosts entirely or perform an in-place upgrade, and that is where the traditional esxcli command came to the rescue.

Please see Broadcom Article ID: 380215 regarding changes to esxcli syntax with upgrading hosts from host CLI

The SATADOM on my SuperMicro E300 servers is only 64GB, so I needed some additional options to mount a datastore, that is when I decided to just use iSCSI storage to mount to the standalone host and upload the binary up to that datastore, and this would now be available to all my hosts once I get a iSCSI Software Adaptor added.

This upgrade requires a reboot. To learn more about vSphere 8.0 ESXCLI, please refer to Broadcom Documentation here. Next step is to SSH into the ESXi host and from CLI place the host in Maintenance Mode so that we can safely reboot after the image is updated.

Placing the host in Maintenance Mode

esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable true

Verify Host is in Maintenance Mode, should report back with ‘Enabled’ (and you can check in the Host UI)

esxcli system maintenanceMode get

The next command is to obtain the Image Profile of the uploaded *.zip file. See example below

esxcli software sources profile list --depot=<depot_URL>

Here are our images, you will want to Copy either the no-tools or standard image

The next command will perform the actual update to the image. I had to add the ‘ –no-hardware-warning’ because an error was thrown out relating to hardware support, however I had another host have it go through, you can try with or without.

esxcli software profile update --depot=/vmfs/volumes/67a7e705-b1512891-3923-5847ca7a9948/esxi803c/VMware-ESXi-8.0U3c-24414501-depot.zip --profile=ESXi-8.0U3c-24414501-standard --no-hardware-warning

The result should bring you to what VIBs were installed, removed and skipped.

You can see the Reboot Required, and from the CLI just type ‘reboot’ and the host will reboot.

Once the host is back up, from the UI check the profile

To validate the final reason I went through all this, the host can now successfully commission in SDDC Manager.

Happy Homelabbing!